Working from Scores by Ken Friedman

Working from Scores by Ken Friedman -- Publishing History The original version of this text was published under the title “The Belgrade Text” in the catalogue of Ken Friedman’s 1990 one-man show, Copernicus in Belgrade. The exhibition was organized by Bojana Pejic at the Student Cultural Center Gallery, University of Belgrade. Friedman, Ken. 1990. “The Belgrade Text” (in) Kopernik u Beogradu: Copernicus in Belgrade. Belgrade: Student Cultural Center Gallery, University of Belgrade. [artist’s text in an exhibition catalogue for a one-man show of Friedman’s work] It was reprinted as: “The Belgrade Text.” Ballade, No. 1, 1991, Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 52-57. Revised 1994 October 16, 2001 May 21 Copyright © 1990, 1994, 2001 by Ken Friedman. All Rights Reserved. This text my be freely quoted, reprinted or used provided that source and copyright are acknowledged. -- Working from Scores by Ken Friedman The idea of musicality in visual art and intermedia has several implications. It means that a work begins as an idea that is transmitted through a score. It means that the work resides in the idea, in the score and in the realized project. The work is equally present in each form, though present in different ways. It means that a realized project is only one interpretation of the work. It means that any work may have several valid realizations, each an interpretation of the artist who realizes the work, in addition to the many possible interpretations of those who experience the realized work. It means that a work may be realized by individuals other than the artist who creates the idea and embodies it in a score. The score uses written notation of some kind to communicate instructions for realizing a work of art. The idea and use of the score is originally rooted in music. In visual art and intermedia, the score offered a way to transmit non-musical art forms. It became a method for encoding, recording and transmitting art forms. The practice of using scores migrated across the boundaries of the several traditions of music, theater, daily life and visual art, and the forms of art that are sometimes summed up under the term intermedia. For some of us, this system of transmitting work became a standard working method. It has been put to use in editions and multiples, collections of scores, festival working sheets and other documents. A number of artists find common ground in the implications of this idea. Early definitions of concept art stressed the idea-based foundation of the work. This suggested the element that I term musicality, and the artists who worked in intermedia and concept art in the early 1960s understood this. The score became a prime characteristic of their work. Artists of differing means and philosophies, some poetic, some socio-political, some oriented toward process or performance, adapted the idea of concept art to their work. Artists as similar and as different as Dick Higgins, Yoko Ono, Robert Filliou, Alison Knowles, Nam June Paik, George Brecht, Ben Vautier, Ben Patterson Emmett Williams and George Maciunas practiced different kinds of concept art, even though relatively few used the term. In 1966, George Maciunas presented the term to me and defined it as a way of working. It offered a useful framework for many divergent ways of making art. By the end of the 60s, the term concept art was conflated into and obscured behind the term conceptual art. The single-genre visual art background of most conceptual artists also obscured the intermedia background and musical involvement of the artists who had been engaged in this kind of work since the early 60s. Some had even been active since the middle 1950s, but in the late 60s, most of the pioneers defined their work without using the terms concept art or conceptual art. The process of scoring, of musical notation, was a common feature linking the work of these artists. Some came from a direct background in music, such as Nam June Paik, Dick Higgins, Eric Andersen, Philip Corner and Ben Patterson. Others also studied music like George Brecht, Alison Knowles or Al Hansen, some -- like these three, in John Cage’s famous course at the New School for Social Research. The musical milieu and the need to make it possible for others to realize the experimental pieces they were creating made the use of scores necessary. Some artists came to see the score as a primary working method in visual art. George Brecht, Dick Higgins, Ben Vautier and Yoko Ono were pioneers in this field. They had all compiled and published collections of scores or annotated proposals by the late 1950s or early 1960s. From its basis in music in the strict sense, the idea of score in its extended form gave rise to the issue of musicality in an extended sense. This extension has important implications. The first of these implications is that the work may exist as work in several forms: -- as idea -- as score -- as process -- as object. Each of these forms has its own value and meaning. The idea is pure, simple and inexpensive. It is easy to store, but difficult to preserve. Ideas are subject to change, to memory loss, to message failure and to interference. For the vast majority of human beings not gifted with telepathy, ideas require a physical medium for transmission -- if only a voice, a pen or a telephone. The score reduces the possibility of change, memory loss, message failure and interference, while retaining many advantages of cost effectiveness. At the same time, storage adds a modest physical task as the price for exact preservation. And preservation does not affect the problem of interpretation -- the possibility of multiple interpretations or even of misinterpretation. Process offers yet another way of understanding work. In orchestral music, theatrical or time-based arts, process is the preferred way to experience work, through live or recorded performance. The advantage here is the most complete possible realization of an interpretation. The disadvantage is linked to the time-bound features: prior to the age of recordings, no experience could be repeated. Even in the age of recordings, the ability to experience several aspects of a piece at once or in comparison -- as is possible with ideas, scores or objects -- remains difficult, linked to expensive equipment. Creation of live performance is time-consuming and often expensive. Creation and storage of process in recorded form is an expensive, capital- intensive medium: though individual recording, storage or playback units are no problem in the industrial world, making them demands a certain kind of society to spread the investment and effort over thousands of financiers and industrialists, millions of producers and billions of consumers. Logistics, transportation, storage, presentation and related issues provide their own difficulties for art forms not traditionally seen as time-based. These include the forms of object-making and presentation now summed up under terms such as process art and arte povera. The object is another form. We all understand objects or we think that we do. We feel that the interpretation frozen in an object is the interpretation chosen by the artist but the object obscures the myriad possibilities that are rejected when the object takes final form. The object suggests an aura of permanence. It hides the process of its own making and it evades the issue of process that it requires to find its final shape. Storage, transportation and -- even for the object -- physical change remain problems. This is also true of the objects left behind by process, such as recordings. Many artists now use scores in works that are touched by the spirit of musicality and many of them find these basic implications acceptable. I assert that musicality has richer and deeper implications. To understand the potential of score-based work, it’s useful to consider how music is transmitted and performed. The composer creates the score. Once the score leaves the composer’s hand in published form, the composer has little control over the way that the music is realized or interpreted. During the period covered by copyright, anyone has the right to perform the music with proper notification and on payment of fees and royalties. Not even that much is required after the copyright expires. The performer determines the interpretation and the composer is obliged to acknowledge authorship even when he or she despises the realization. No matter how good or bad a performance of Don Giovanni, it is always Mozart. The thinnest Ring Cycle is still Wagner. Everyone within reach of a radio has heard some of the more than 200 versions of Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind, ranging from Dylan’s own protest-inflected ballad to the saccharine orchestrations created for Muzak and elevators. There have been disco versions, blues versions and even a pompous and inflated symphonic orchestration. Beethoven done for disco and Beatles gone baroque are still the work of their respective composers. The royalties on Beatles tunes must be paid to the rights-holder -- Michael Jackson. Neither Jackson nor Paul McCartney can forbid Eleanor Rigby from being used as a marching tune for an armored infantry division. McCartney had little luck when Jackson granted permission for an automobile company to use one of McCartney’s songs in an advertising campaign. To compose is to give up certain rights. One right that a composer loses is the right of absolute control over the use and interpretation of the work. In score-based work, I assert that the artist must naturally give up a certain element of control. Certain issues fall under the scope of moral rights in copyright jurisdiction or art law.

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